On Wen Ruzhou’s third official day on the job, Old Zhao handed me something.
It wasn’t a verbal report, but a handwritten summary table on an A4 sheet of paper, densely packed with entries.
“She drew it herself,” Old Zhao said, placing the paper on my desk. “In three days, she went through almost all of our illegal fund-raising case files from the past five years and redrew the capital flow diagrams for every single one. She flagged every place that didn’t add up.”
I picked it up to look.
Four columns: Case Number, Case Name, Capital Chain Suspicions, Recommended Investigation Direction. The handwriting was neat and the entries were clear, looking much like working papers prepared by the National Audit Office.
The last line read: Dingsheng Case, Priority A, recommend joint investigation with the Zhou Jianguo Case.
I set the paper down.
“Did she talk to you about the case over the past two days?”
“We talked,” Old Zhao nodded. “She asked about a few details regarding the Dingsheng case. I told her whatever I could.”
“What didn’t you tell her?”
Old Zhao fell silent for two seconds.
“The matter regarding Zhou Jianguo.”
I didn’t press further on why.
Old Zhao was from the same batch as my mentor. When my mentor let go of the Zhou Jianguo line back then, no more than three people in the entire detachment knew about it. Old Zhao hadn’t spoken because Zhou Qiming had instructed him not to.
“This diagram she drew,” I flipped the paper over to check the back, “where was it kept?”
“She asked me to pass it on to you.”
“How did she know you would give it to me?”
Old Zhao gave a faint smile: “She said, ‘Brother Zhao, Captain Shen will read this sooner or later. I’m just paving the way for her a little earlier.'”
I didn’t say anything.
Paving the way for her a little earlier.
Those were not the words of a newcomer.
A newcomer would say “Could you please pass this to her,” or “If Captain Shen has time, please have her take a look.” She said, “Read this sooner or later”—she was certain I would look at it.
It wasn’t self-confidence; it was a deduction.
She deduced that I would be interested in the Dingsheng case.
On what grounds?
At two in the afternoon, I went to the archives.
The door was left ajar. I pushed it open and stepped inside without making a sound.
She was leaning over the desk, her hair pinned back with a pencil, with five or six case files spread out beside her hands. But she wasn’t reading—she was drawing something.
An A3-sized piece of white paper was laid over the files, and she was drawing lines and arrows on it. She drew very slowly, stopping for a few seconds after every stroke to look at the numbers in the case files before putting her pencil back to paper.
I walked around behind her, following her gaze down.
It was a capital flow diagram.
Starting from the receiving account of Dingsheng Company, it branched into seven or eight secondary lines, pointing to various corporate and individual accounts. Most of the lines broke off halfway—the capital chain couldn’t be traced beyond that point. Only two lines extended all the way through, connecting to a single name: Zhou Jianguo.
But that wasn’t what caught my attention.
What I noticed was her method of drawing the diagram.
In our police system, when tracking the movement of funds, we conventionally use “forward tracking”—starting from the suspect’s account, following the money, and chasing it wherever it goes. This is fundamental for economic crime investigation.
She wasn’t using this method.
She was tracing backward from the terminal accounts—annotating each layer of funding sources with timestamps and percentage ratios, peeling it back layer by layer like an onion.
This was the penetrative analysis used by the Audit Office.
It differed from our method. But—the diagram she drew was clearer than any financial analysis report I had ever seen before.
“I don’t quite understand these two lines.”
She whipped her head around sharply.
I hadn’t uttered a sound; she had no idea how long I had been standing behind her.
Yet she didn’t panic—there was only a brief moment of surprise before she quickly recovered. The corners of her lips even curled up slightly.
“Captain Shen, do you walk without making a sound?”
“This diagram you drew,” I ignored her comment, “what method did you use?”
“The Audit Office’s penetrative analysis,” she answered without hesitation, turning around to push the A3 paper toward me. “Tracing backward from the terminal accounts. Annotating each layer with timestamps and percentage shares.”
“Why didn’t you use forward tracking?”
“Because forward tracking is good for chasing destination,” she picked up her pencil and tapped the paper twice. “But the problem with the Dingsheng case isn’t the destination; it’s the source. Look at these two lines—”
She pointed at the two lines connected to Zhou Jianguo’s name.
“Zhou Jianguo’s capital flows intersect with the Dingsheng case, but there is no direct connection. According to normal logic, money from illegal fund-raising is either used for payouts, squandered, or transferred and hidden. But the money from these two lines ended up in Zhou Jianguo’s personal account. And Zhou Jianguo—” She flipped through the file beside her, “—never participated in Dingsheng’s actual operations.”
“So?”
“So this money wasn’t ‘traced to’ his name; it was ‘delivered to’ his name,” she looked at me. “Someone was paying him. How long they paid him and why they paid him—that is the key to this case.”
I didn’t respond to her analysis.
“You stumbled upon the Dingsheng case on your very first day—was that a coincidence?”
“No.”
“Explain.”
“That day, you told me to go to the archives to organize old cases,” she tilted her head slightly. “While organizing, I was thinking—the purpose of organizing old cases isn’t just to sort them, but to observe your detachment’s case-handling habits. What kind of cases get archived? After archiving, does anyone continue to pursue them? Where are the cases placed when they are abandoned halfway through?”
“So you dug up Dingsheng.”
“The Dingsheng file was placed alone at the very bottom of the archive cabinet,” she said. “Cases archived chronologically wouldn’t be on the bottom shelf—it was closed five years ago. Yet its layer of dust was the thickest, its label the oldest, and its position tucked out of the way. Either nobody cared about it anymore, or someone was deliberately hiding it.”
“Which one do you think it is?”
She looked at me for two seconds.
“What do you think, Captain?”
I didn’t answer.
She didn’t press the question either; she simply retrieved the A3 paper, folded it twice, and tucked it into her notebook.
“Captain Shen, should I keep drawing?”
“You’ve been drawing for three days. Are you finished?”
“Just missing the final layer.”
“What final layer?”
“After Zhou Jianguo received the money, he transferred it out again. Where it went next—I haven’t cleared that up yet,” she picked up her pencil. “But there is something very odd—the two to three ten-thousand yuan he received every month came from an account named Huacheng Trading. This company’s main business is import and export trade, with an annual turnover of no more than five million. A company with an annual revenue of five million couldn’t possibly transfer twenty to thirty thousand yuan regularly to an individual every month.”
“So?”
“So this company might not be doing business,” she said. “It might be doing ‘work’.”
Doing work.
People from the Audit Office speak differently from the police. We say “crime”; she says “doing work.” But the meaning was the same—Huacheng Trading was doing things on behalf of someone else. What kind of things, it remained uncertain.
“Keep digging,” I stood up. “Tell me whatever you find.”
“Tell you?” She looked up at me. “You aren’t going to call me out for going over superiors’ heads?”
“If you can actually dig up results by going over heads, then it isn’t called going over heads.”
She gave a faint smile, offered no reply, and lowered her head to continue drawing.
As I reached the door, she suddenly spoke up.
“Captain Shen.”
“Hmm?”
“On the first day, you said, ‘Newcomers learn to obey first, then learn to question.'”
“Hmm.”
“I remembered it,” she didn’t look up, her pencil scratching softly against the paper. “But what I obey are the rules, not the inertia.”
I didn’t answer.
The door closed behind me.
One of the lights in the corridor was broken; I stood there for a few seconds where the light and shadow flickered.
Rules are rigid, but people are adaptable. Cops who blindly follow routine can at best solve standard cases, but only those who play outside the box can unearth old debts.
Her sentence was something I had said fifteen years ago.
That night, I stayed alone in the office until very late.
I pulled out all the case files for the Dingsheng case and went through them from the beginning.
I reviewed every single detail of the case my mentor handled fifteen years ago. Not to find fault, but to find leads.
I had looked into Zhou Jianguo before, but not deeply. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, but the timing wasn’t right. Fifteen years ago, I had just joined the force; I couldn’t even protect my own mentor, so what would I have used to fight those people?
But things were different now.
The capital flow diagram drawn by Wen Ruzhou was clearer than the one left behind by my mentor back then. It wasn’t that she was better than my mentor—she just didn’t carry any baggage.
When my mentor investigated the case back then, there were too many people to consider: the superiors’ faces, the colleagues taking sides, and the risk of unwittingly offending someone unknown. Wen Ruzhou was different; she was parachuted in from the Audit Office, completely unentangled with the local web of relationships.
She could investigate with a free hand.
But I couldn’t let her investigate alone.
What lay behind the Zhou Jianguo line, I didn’t know. But I knew that when the Dingsheng case was hurriedly closed fifteen years ago—taking only two months from filing to closure—someone must have pushed it behind the scenes.
A two-month closure was absurdly fast in the economic crime investigation system. Ordinarily, an illegal fund-raising case takes no less than half a year just to gather evidence and determine its nature.
Someone had given a word.
To whom was the word given? To the officers handling the case back then. To make them turn the case into an airtight verdict, getting the main suspect to plead guilty and accept punishment, ending everything in apparent harmony.
But the real money was never fully recovered.
The portion Zhou Jianguo received was precisely the unrecovered part.
Or rather—it was the portion he deserved.
He was the middleman.
I leaned back against the chair and closed my eyes.
My phone screen lit up with a message from Old Zhao.
“Captain Shen, Wen Ruzhou just called me to ask about Huacheng Trading. I said I didn’t know. She then asked if Zhou Jianguo had ever come to our place after getting out of prison, and I said I had no recollection. She didn’t press further.”
I replied: “When did she ask?”
“Ten minutes ago.”
I checked the time—10:47 PM.
She was still investigating at this hour.
I turned off my phone, stood up, and walked to the window.
Our detachment’s office building was in the old district. Outside the window lay an old residential block; most of the lights were off, with only a scattered few still glowing.
I didn’t know where Wen Ruzhou lived, nor did I know if she was still flipping through case files right now. But I knew she was like me—she had an unsettled account in her heart.
Except she was settling someone else’s account.
I was settling my own.
At 7:30 the next morning, when I arrived at the office, an extra document lay on my desk.
It was handwritten, with the cover title reading: Supplementary Analysis Report on Dingsheng Case Capital Flow, Author: Wen Ruzhou.
I flipped to the first page.
The logic of the report was crystal clear. Starting from the capital flow of the Dingsheng case, it traced all the way to Zhou Jianguo. After Zhou Jianguo received the money, it was split into three portions and transferred in three directions.
The first portion was transferred to a capital verification account of an investment company named “Pengcheng,” which was deregistered three days later.
The second portion was transferred under the guise of a “loan” to Zhou Jianguo’s sister, Wang Xiulan, who was handling a real estate transaction at the time.
The third portion was withdrawn in cash, with no records left.
The destinations of all three sums were clearly traced. But in the final paragraph of the report, she wrote a line that made me pause—
“The registration date of Huacheng Trading (2008) is two years later than Zhou Jianguo’s release from prison (2006). A medium-sized trading company with an annual revenue of five million is unlikely to make fixed monthly transfers of twenty to thirty thousand yuan to an unemployed individual. Unless this money was not a salary.”
She didn’t write “what it was instead.”
But her meaning was obvious—she was waiting for me to arrive at the conclusion myself.
I closed the report.
Footsteps sounded outside the door, followed by two soft knocks.
“Come in.”
Wen Ruzhou pushed the door open and stepped in. Today she had changed into a white shirt, her hair tied in a ponytail, exposing a clean forehead and a pair of silver earrings.
Seeing me reading the report, she smiled slightly: “Captain Shen, you got up even earlier than I did.”
“I read your report.”
“How is it?”
“It lacks the most important thing.”
“What?”
“Motive,” I placed the report on the desk. “Why did Huacheng Trading pay Zhou Jianguo? Did you find out?”
She fell silent for a second.
“There is a lead, but it hasn’t been verified yet.”
“Speak.”
“The legal representative of Huacheng Trading is named Lin Meihua, a Shenzhen native who owns six companies under her name spanning real estate, investment, and catering. She has no connections to any criminal cases and appears to be just an ordinary businessperson.”
“Appears to be.”
“Mm, appears to be,” she paused. “But I checked another company under Lin Meihua’s name—Huasheng Property. The largest client of this company is Manhua Group.”
Manhua Group.
Wen Manhua’s company.
Wen Ruzhou’s mother.
She had traced it all the way here.
I looked at her without speaking.
Her expression didn’t change and the smile remained, but the light deep within her eyes shifted—it wasn’t probing, nor was it defiance. It was the kind of light that said, “I’ve reached a place I shouldn’t walk into alone, and I’m waiting for you to come.”
“You checked this,” I said slowly, “because of Zhou Jianguo, or because of something else?”
She tilted her head: “Captain Shen, what do you think?”
What did I think?
I thought her transfer from the Audit Office to economic crime investigation wasn’t a routine job reassignment.
I thought her unearthing the Dingsheng case was no coincidence.
I thought her tracing Huacheng Trading was no accident, and tracing Manhua Group was even less so.
She was looking for something.
A person from the Audit Office, transferred to the municipal police bureau’s economic crime detachment, reassigned to the archives on her very first day, and then pinpointing a fifteen-year-old cold case out of more than two thousand files—
This wasn’t luck.
This was a clear objective.
“Wen Ruzhou,” I stood up and walked up to her, “was your transfer from the Audit Office to economic crime investigation voluntary, or an organizational arrangement?”
Her smile faltered briefly.
Extremely brief.
Then she said: “Captain Shen, I cannot answer this question for you right now.”
“Cannot, or will not?”
“—What do you think?”
There was less than a step between us.
People were talking outside in the hallway, their voices filtering through the door panel, muffled and faint. Inside the office, it was quiet, save for the hum of the air conditioner.
“Starting today, you’re with me,” I said.
She froze for a moment.
“Don’t you want to investigate Zhou Jianguo? Starting today, you are in charge of this line, but you report everything to me.”
“Why?”
“Because the person behind the Zhou Jianguo line isn’t someone you can handle alone,” I looked at her. “And—”
I paused briefly.
“—the matter with Manhua Group isn’t something you should touch.”
Her expression finally changed.
It wasn’t surprise, nor was it panic. It was a momentary blankness—the brief dropping of her smile after being hit right on the mark.
It was very short, lasting less than a second.
Then she smiled again.
“Captain Shen, are you protecting me?”
“I am protecting this investigation line,” I said. “You haven’t proven yet that you’re worth me taking risks for.”
She looked at me and smiled for a long time.
Then she spoke a sentence in a very soft voice:
“Then when will you take a risk?”
I didn’t answer.
As I turned to walk toward the door, she spoke behind my back: “Captain Shen, regarding Huacheng Property—I didn’t investigate any further.”
I paused for a second.
“I know,” I said.
Then I pushed the door open and walked out.
Returning to my desk, I flipped to the very last page of that report.
She had written a line of annotation in very small handwriting, almost easy to miss:
“It is recommended to hold off on this line. To be discussed after the main line becomes clear.”
She was reminding me.
In the manner of a newcomer—not overstepping, not taking matters into her own hands, simply stating what needed to be said, and then waiting for your decision.
I closed the report, placed it inside a drawer, and locked it.
Then I turned on the computer and pulled up another window.
Search: Wen Ruzhou.
Audit Office. Joined in 2019. Transferred to the Municipal Public Security Bureau Economic Crime Investigation Detachment in 2024.
The reassignment reason column contained two words—“Personal Application.”
Personal Application.
A person from the Audit Office, actively applying for a transfer to a grassroots police economic crime unit.
Why?
I closed the window.
Not now.
But sooner or later, I would find out.